Creativity is an output, not an input.
A repost of a tweet by @bpoppenheimer:
In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, & Reebok were all selling more shoes. So, in a panicked attempt to find creative talent, Nike held a shoe design contest.
The winner was a corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield. “Two days after the competition,” he said, “I wasn’t even asked — I was told that I was now a footwear designer for Nike.”
As he got to work on his first official shoe design, he thought about a building he had studied in architecture school: The Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Centre Pompidou is an inside-out building, meaning that the structural, mechanical, and circulation systems are all exposed. “That building,” Tinker said, “was describing what it was to the people of Paris. And I thought, ‘Well why not do that with a shoe? Let’s cut a hole in the side and show what’s in the shoe.’” So Tinker designed an inside-out shoe: The Air Max 1.
The Air Max 1 was a massive success, and it steered Nike’s design direction from then on. “To this day,” Tinker says, “Phil Knight says I saved Nike.”
Takeaway 1: Had he not studied that building in Paris, Tinker says, he couldn’t have created the Air Max. Creativity, he says, is a function of the “library in your head.” “When you sit down to create something…what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.”
Takeaway 2: Tinker Hatfield went to architecture school and then he was a corporate architect for 4.5 years. Then, literally overnight, he became one of the best shoe designers in the world. This makes me think of a counter-intuitive discovery made by psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904. Before Spearman, the natural assumption was that the more you specialize in one thing, the worse you’ll be at other things. Instead, Spearman discovered “the positive manifold” phenomenon. He found that different abilities tend to be positively correlated. That the expertise gained through specialization is transferrable. That the cognitive and creative abilities cultivated as an architect could positively correlate with being a shoe designer.
“The reality is that creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.” — Robert Greene
LM’s Commentary: Creativity is not a magic bolt of inspiration from out of the blue. It is the output of hours, days, weeks, months, and years of tedious work, which creates a body of knowledge and connections and processes in the mind from which truly creative ideas can emerge. As John Boyd said, creativity is always about synthesis. Nothing is new; novelty is the result of looking or combining old things in new ways. And to do that, you have to know the old things. This is why every truly great creator — be it an artist, designer, or scientific theoretician — is a student of their discipline and craft, not a novice with natural talents.
